[tlug] Recovery (for Small Values of Recover)

[CL <az.4tlug@example.com>]

Somewhere farther down this screed is a request for help / advice.  If 
you want to skip down to "On the minus side" it's there

Thanks for the replies re: my dead HDD.  Frankly, the solutions that are 
on the table are way outside my budget and I'll look for ways to get 
this done by other means.  I'll be contacting the people who got in 
touch -- publicly and privately -- by private reply.

I've located several used versions of the same model HDDs with the same 
product number, made in the same factory and two of them were made in 
the same month.  JPY 3,500 I can afford and there _may_ be some publicly 
available software from IBM / Hitachi that, I am advised, will resolve 
conflicts between what's in flash memory and the reality of the new disk 
it's installed on and has about a 90% chance of getting the disk running 
long enough to mirror it.  Hitachi US is emailing me an iso copy.

The replacement drive is in the case and Kubuntu 11.10 is installed ... 
which is both a plus and a minus.  I'm finding pieces of the files and 
addresses I need to continue in various places where I'd squirreled them 
away, but the loss of this disk was badly timed.

On the plus side the clean install is much faster than this same machine 
was with a series of upgrades that started back with Kubuntu 8-something 
and had a lot of excess baggage.  Firefox and Thunderbird started just 
fine with pre-3-11 profiles I cadged off the HDD from my laptop with the 
screen that got broken in the fall off the counter during the Big One.  
I even got back a couple of lost passwords.  Claws Mail is another story 
... and it's going to take a while to restore my settings.  It was even 
more heavily customized than the last saved copy I had.

On the minus side ... and where I need help ... Ibus.  I installed Ibus, 
Ibus-anthy, and Anthy from the command line.  I had to use Alt + F2 to 
get into the setup / config menu and I set it up the same way I'd 
configured Ibus-anthy in the past.  But now, there is no Anthy on the 
drop down menu.  The word "Japanese >" appears in the drop down menu but 
Anthy is nowhere to be seen.  And that is after re-re-re-installing 
language support and re-installing languages (I included support for the 
languages I speak / read / write [English (US / UK), Japanese, Chinese 
(Traditional / Simplified), German] but only selected English and 
Japanese for actual use ... just like I've been doing through several 
other iterations of Kubuntu.

I recall that there is a config file I also want to check to make sure 
my languages are listed but after three hours of Googling, all I am is 
crosseyed.  Can someone remind me?  BTW, Scott Robbins' site, which has 
been of help in the past could not be found ... which I think is a 
problem here and not there but I mention it anyway.

Any other suggestions or information on other sites I should check on my 
own gratefully accepted.

--
CL